A 36-year-old Detroit man who ran a fentanyl pipeline from Michigan into southern Ohio using rental cars, car-sharing apps and paid couriers has been sentenced to 30 to 35.5 years in prison. Anton Glynn Miles pleaded guilty to 16 felony charges in Scioto County Common Pleas Court, closing out a case that traces back to three highway stops in 2022 and ended with his capture at a Kentucky residence stocked with more than a kilogram of suspected fentanyl.
As reported by the Scioto Valley Guardian, Miles was charged with one count of engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, three counts of trafficking in a fentanyl-related compound with major drug offender specifications, and 12 counts of possessing criminal tools. Under his agreed sentence, he will not be eligible for release until he has served at least 24 years, with the deal including at least 18 mandatory years. Prosecutors say that had he gone to trial and lost, Miles would have faced a mandatory minimum of 42 years.
Three Traffic Stops Unraveled the Route
The case against Miles began unraveling through a string of interdiction stops on State Route 823, the four-lane Portsmouth Bypass that Ohio State Highway Patrol Trooper Lewis, a 20-year veteran assigned to District 9 criminal patrol, has used for years to intercept drug traffic. On January 12, 2022, Lewis stopped a 2021 Ford Escape driven by a 22-year-old courier on the highway; a search turned up about 600 grams of fentanyl hidden in a magnetic box near the vehicle's exhaust. The bypass, a $646 million public-private project that opened in December 2018, routes traffic around Portsmouth between U.S. 52 and U.S. 23, according to background details compiled on Wikipedia.
Lewis stopped a second vehicle, a 2020 Nissan Rogue rented in Livonia, Michigan, on April 22, 2022, finding about 405 grams of fentanyl concealed in a bag of clothing. Then, on August 15, 2022, Lewis stopped a van and a rental Chevrolet Suburban together; investigators say Miles instructed the driver to flee during that stop. Trooper Anthony Day and his K9 partner later found about 237 grams of narcotics hidden in a Folgers coffee container coated in gear grease, per the Scioto Valley Guardian's reporting.
A Fugitive Reroutes Through Kentucky
After that August 2022 stop, investigators say Miles rerouted his operation through Indianapolis into northern Kentucky, shifting his supply corridor away from the highway patrol's interdiction zone. The Southern Ohio Drug Task Force, made up of the Scioto County Sheriff's Office, Portsmouth Police Department, the Scioto County Prosecutor's Office and the FBI, was brought into the investigation as Miles adjusted his tactics, according to background from the Ohio Task Force Commanders Association. Miles had distribution ties in Indianapolis and Chicago and directed a network moving bulk fentanyl and heroin from Detroit into northern Kentucky, Huntington, West Virginia, and southern Ohio, prosecutors say. Evidence indicated the trips had been happening monthly dating back to July 2021.
Detectives tracked Miles through Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky before law enforcement located him on November 2, 2025, in Grayson, Kentucky. According to the Carter County Times, the Carter County Sheriff's Department and federal partners arrested Miles alongside local co-defendant Craig Horton on an Ohio fugitive warrant while he was transporting more than 1,080 grams of fentanyl packaged into over 10,000 dosage units. A search of the Grayson residence turned up more than 1,000 grams of suspected fentanyl and cutting agents, along with a rifle. Craig Heath Horton has been described as a local distributor with an active felony warrant, and he faces his own pending case; suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court.
Rental Cars and Rideshares as Cover
Investigators say Miles avoided detection by relying on commercial rental vehicles and car-sharing services, financing rentals in co-conspirators' names and adding couriers as authorized drivers to keep his own name off the paperwork. The rental practices formed the basis for the criminal tools charges against him. Companies named in the case include Hertz, Avis, Enterprise, Lyft and Turo; Miles was driving a 2024 Toyota Camry rented from an Enterprise location in Royal Oak, Michigan, at one point, and he rented other vehicles in Michigan as well. He reportedly paid a Detroit Lyft driver $500 per trip.
Following his November arrest, Miles was extradited to Ohio and booked into the Scioto County Jail on November 24, 2025, per the Scioto Valley Guardian. He was returning to face a 34-count indictment a Scioto County grand jury had handed up in August 2025, the product of roughly three years of investigative work building a case for that grand jury.
Statutory Minimums Drove the Sentence
Ohio law gave prosecutors substantial leverage in the case. Under Ohio Revised Code Section 2925.03, trafficking 100 grams or more of fentanyl triggers Major Drug Offender status, which mandates a first-degree felony conviction along with sentence enhancements of three to eight additional years under a separate statute, according to the Botnick Law Firm. Miles's indefinite sentencing structure also stems from Ohio's Reagan Tokes Law, enacted in 2019, which requires judges to set a minimum prison term while giving state prison authorities discretion to hold offenders up to a calculated maximum — typically the minimum term plus 50 percent, per guidance from the Supreme Court of Ohio.
Scioto County Prosecuting Attorney Shane A. Tieman, who has held office since 2018, credited a long list of agencies with building the case: the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Southern Ohio Drug Task Force, Portsmouth Police Department, Scioto County Sheriff's Office, Kentucky law enforcement agencies, Indiana State Police, and DEA and FBI task forces. The prosecutor's office called the sentence one of the most significant in Scioto County's history.
As a separate Cincinnati-area precedent, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio reported that two leaders of a prolific online drug-trafficking organization were sentenced to 16 and 18 years in federal prison in October 2023. In another separate Cincinnati federal case, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio said six Texans were sentenced to prison for trafficking nearly 12 kilograms through a large-scale dark-web drug-trafficking organization.
A County Hit Hard by Opioids
That characterization reflects the toll fentanyl has taken locally. Scioto County recorded an overdose death rate of 100.5 per 100,000 residents from 2022 to 2024, among the highest in Ohio, according to public health surveillance data compiled from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Statewide, unintentional drug overdose deaths in Ohio dropped 34% from 2023 to 2024, with fentanyl-related fatalities falling 42%, though fentanyl was still involved in 69% of all fatal overdoses in the state in 2024, per the Ohio Department of Health.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration's 2019 National Drug Threat Assessment, traffickers continued to manufacture and distribute counterfeit CPDs often containing fentanyl and other opioids alongside non-opioid illicit drugs.
The scale of what was seized underscores the stakes: the DEA calculates that one kilogram of illicit fentanyl contains approximately 500,000 potentially lethal doses, according to K105. With more than a kilogram found at the Kentucky residence alone, on top of the hundreds of grams intercepted during the 2022 traffic stops, the case represents one of the larger fentanyl pipelines Scioto County authorities have dismantled in recent years.
